God of Fire, God of Wood, God of Nothing At All

It was Nowruz when the retired fire god made the biggest mistake of his life. “Have a good day, Roland,” his wife said, handing him his sack lunch. She kissed him goodbye, quickly swiping her lips with a cool rag to prevent singeing. 

Roland the retired fire god stood behind the post office counter. It seemed like yesterday when he was annihilating forests and igniting cities with his red fingers and glowing mouth. Good times. Dreamily he smelled some letters. What a picnic he would have had with them in the old days.  

“Perkins! Stop licking the envelopes!” shouted his supervisor.  

Roland hastily took the letters out of his mouth and threw them into the sorting bins, mumbling apologies. It wouldn’t do to get fired. After their brief separation, and months of pleading, Darya had relented and moved back home. Her terms of return had included this desk job and couples therapy. “One day you’ll thank me,” she always said after their sessions. 

Ever since the yule log incident the retired fire god had been relieved of his duties. The curtains had been repaired, the rug replaced, and the cat’s fur had nearly grown back. Despite that, Darya forbade him to perform his life’s work any more, even something so small as lighting the stove. Now instead of consuming paper, he sorted it.

“You’re mail delivery today,” the supervisor barked at him, hanging up the phone. “Johnston’s wife just went into labor.”

Labor. Good for Johnston and his doughy, freckled wife, though their offspring would likely resemble a ciabatta with raisin eyes. Darya had wanted kids. But on their wedding night when he finally kissed her she screamed, scorching under his lips. He’d tried everything, wearing gloves, bathing in ice water, but each time he touched Darya her pale skin reddened and blistered. Finally they had to settle for an elderly cat with apocalyptic breath and a pitcher of water on the nightstand in case of accidental contact.

Roland strapped on the mail sack and strode off in the heat. The midday sun made him come alive in ways he was no longer allowed to discuss in therapy. Warmth woke his skin and bones, cleared out old ashes and prayers. He closed his eyes; his feet dreamed the ancient dance steps.

The Persian family had set dinner out in the garden: chicken with pomegranates and walnuts, stuffed dates and fig cakes. Shrills of laughter woke Roland from his reverie, and he came forward to drop mail into the gaily painted box. The younger women ran towards him. “Uncle, dance with us,” they said; smiling, he turned away, but the patriarch saw him and insisted he stay, handing him a plate of food. “And jump the fire, too,” he said, pointing through the trees.

Fire. Through the swaying branches a seductive gold bonfire danced: his Achilles heel. He knew the danger but the crackle of the flames licked at his senses, overriding reason, and he picked his way through the dry pines and joined the circle. Five minutes, he told hmself. He would leave before his temperature rose. The young people made lists, threw them in the fire, then jumped over it. “What do you want to release? Write it down, give it to the fire,” the patriarch said, and handed him a slip of fresh creamy paper. Roland crushed it to his nose, savoring its clean scent.

An ember flew out and landed on his arm, and instinctively he ate it. The fire spread her seductive golden arms wide to him. Memories of her embrace, her hot breath tonguing at his skin  and his body dissolving under her parted lips enveloped his senses. “Go,” the patriarch urged, and “jump! jump! jump!” the young women shouted, and before he could stop himself Roland threw his crumpled list into the flames and leaped.

Afterwards, when the fire trucks had gone and his wife had packed her bags and left, Roland crept back to the still smoking circle. The Persian family was safely asleep in their beds and so no one saw when the ancient ways, so long hidden under marriage and legal obligation, began to stir the lava back into his veins, whispering, insisting, then finally shouting till at last he stood, filled with gratitude and resignation. “Thank you, Darya,” he said, and he began to dance.  

Kashmir

“I'm a traveler of both time and space

To be where I have been

To sit with elders of the gentle race

This world has seldom seen

They talk of days for which they sit and wait

All will be revealed”

-  Jimmy Page and Robert Plant

If Kenna closed her eyes she could still hear him crying. The glass exploding, like little triangles of light, over her dress, into her eyes, her hair. It was like a dream, cornering her mind into that one moment in time that she relived whenever she tried to sleep.

To keep her mind from worrying at the scene like a dog with a bone, she counted. She counted her steps. She counted glasses of water, and number of swallows per glass. She counted his tee shirts as she bagged them for Goodwill. She counted his Lego’s, sorting them into the appropriate boxes. She counted to keep her mind off the now flat and dreary life that stretched out before her, to keep her mind off of how it always felt like winter, even when it was spring.

One rainy morning she left as usual, counting and avoiding eye contact with anyone, and at around step number eight hundred and seventeen she felt a ripple in the air. Must be snow coming. She pulled her sweater tighter and and walked quicker, but didn’t jog. That messed up the accuracy of the step count. As she was passing the Seven Eleven she noticed the spotty clerk having one last cigarette before his shift. Led Zeppelin crashed out a chorus from his souped up car: “Come on, oh let me take you there, let me take you there,” Robert Plant was wailing. Suddenly there was a rift in the dark air, like a window being thrown open on a brisk winter morning. The spotty clerk watched, open-mouthed, as the ground spiraled away from Kenna’s feet. She was floundering, or falling, or maybe flying, but before she could even freak out she landed with a whump in a hard chair. There were twelve iridescent humans seated around a long table in front of her, and the nearest one was looking at her in great amusement. “Hello, Kenna,” she said, laughing. “Right on time!”

Kenna stared around her, sure that she was asleep. She’d read somewhere that you couldn’t taste anything in your dreams, so she bent over and bit the table. Ouch. Woody. The twelve watched, clearly taken aback. “Are you… hungry?” the woman said. Kenna shook her head and kept scanning the horizon. There were purple and pink iridescent clouds everywhere, and crystal cathedrals in the background. The whole thing was like something Maxfield Parrish would have painted if he’d dropped acid and was born poor and Dutch.

“Well, if you’re ready we’ll get started,” the woman said, thumbing through a giant ledger. She could have been the love child of Barbara Eden and the genie from Aladdin, nearly eight feet high and blue as a robin’s egg. “By the way, you can call me Tally Blue. I’m the head of your soul council, and the one you are most likely to connect with in your human incarnation. We called this meeting with you, Kenna, just as you requested before you manifested into your current body. As you know, there are many—er, breadcrumbs that a soul leaves for itself in case it gets slightly off track while embodied. One of the checkpoints you set up for yourself was this meeting. You won’t remember this obviously, but we all sat right here around thirty seven years ago and mapped everything out.”

There was some mumbling from the end of the table at that. A round walleyed pinkish man was shaking his head. “Yes, yes,” said Tally Blue. “Sidereal Billy was the one that caught the anomaly. Normally a soul will at least use one of the clues, but you kept ignoring yours. Seven of them, to be exact. Most irregular. In desperation we used music to establish communication. Apparently you and another soul—a friend of yours?—used to wander around singing some song about being a traveler of time and space, so we just used some of those lyrics to trigger the portal. In fact,” she glanced at the ledger, “it looks as though he manifested in your timeline too. He also recorded the song; I believe it’s quite popular. His name is Robert. Are you friends with him in your human incarnation?”

Robert? She couldn’t possibly be talking about Robert Plant? “Um, no?” Kenna stammered. 

“Oh wait, I need to fix something…” she waved her hand and a portal opened through which the Seven Eleven was clearly visible. The pimply clerk was standing in the lot, jaw hanging. Tally Blue traced a ‘C’ with her forefinger, and now they could all see a seam in time, like wallpaper that didn’t quite line up. Instead of standing in the lot the clerk was sitting in his car as though nothing had happened, radio blaring and cigarette smoke curling about his slack face.

Tally Blue snapped the portal shut and made a note in a ledger. “We have to document any time adjustments, especially when we copy, cut and paste from another one. It’s generally frowned upon, but this was an emergency. If we hadn’t removed that memory from that young man, he would have shared the story of you getting sucked into the portal, been diagnosed as schizophrenic, placed on aggressive medicine, and would have never found the cure for cancer. That’s why we hesitate to tweak timelines much. At any rate,” she continued, “we owe you an explanation. First, do you know what a mantra is?”

Kenna thought it was some phrase said over and over by crazy monks, but Tally Blue continued before she could speak. “A mantra is a form of core truth presented in a few syllables. In the case of humans, it was decided that each human’s name would be a mantra, containing universal truth and the truth of their individual soul’s path. This happens as soon as the human parents name the baby. The mantra is mapped into both given name and nicknames. That way, when the child hears her name, the mantra of her soul’s longing is sung to her. It’s a way of reminding humans, though many forget anyway. 

“In your case, there was a bit of a mixup. The mantra that was programmed for you was not the one your soul requested. We’re not sure how this happened—to our knowledge it’s never happened before—but we may be able to remedy it. Of course, this means that certain events in your current life will have to change, such as your name. We aren’t sure which the correct timeline was, but we’ve narrowed them down to three, including the current one which you can still choose to complete, so we are going to show them all to you and you will decide which one you will actually live.”

“So… it’s a do over?” Kenna asked. “I can make a different choice? There doesn’t need to be an accident?”

“Well, here’s how it works, Kenna,” Tally Blue said. “Obviously we know that the first rule of time travel is ‘CHANGE NOTHING.’ Unfortunately, for reasons beyond our control, in all three timelines the accident happens. One of the main reasons is that if you change something, everyone else’s story can change too, without their knowledge or consent. From a karmic standpoint it’s just not in alignment. But Sidereal Billy found a tiny loophole which we think just might work.”

“You don’t change one thing! You change the whole thing,” Sidereal Billy blurted out. “You won’t be the exact current you, but a slightly different version. We’re not one hundred percent sure but we think it will work.”

“There are a few different elements in each timeline, and some of the peripheral people change, but as far as we can tell all those close to you are exactly the same. Like I said, this is all theoretical. We won’t know, but all will be revealed, I imagine. Here’s the current one—“ she opened an ornately decorated box which appeared to be made of pink fog and lights. In it were three slide viewing contraptions, like old fashioned View-Masters from the seventies. She handed one to Kenna, who began flipping through the slides and saw herself, thirteen years ago, holding a small human burrito and grinning so hard her face was nearly split. She’d never felt that sort of love before.

The slides tumbled past as she turned a knob, but it was not like normal slide viewing. It was as though she was actually there, reliving every moment in real time—except real time was just a snapshot of memories. There they were on the first day of school, beaming into the camera lens. She could smell the burned toast she’d forgotten to rescue from the faulty toaster. Then the day he fell out of the tree and broke his arm. She heard him screaming with pain as she ran to scoop him up, feeling helpless and terrified. There was a slide of the day his father left for good, leaving the two of them alone. She held his little hand tightly as the moving truck drove away, and then they’d built blanket forts and watched SpongeBob all afternoon. He was so quiet. He internalized everything and said nothing. The pain of her son’s heartbreak eclipsed any silly heartache she’d ever experienced. She saw him walking to the car in the next slide, his serious brown eyes behind his glasses, assessing the horizon as he always did. He liked to look at the sky. The neighbor’s dog pushed the gate open, bounced up to them and batted the boy all over his blue Physical Graffiti tee-shirt, decorating it with his muddy paws. Kenna suddenly realized it was the morning of the accident. No, she thought, I can’t see this again. The next slide showed them in the car, at the intersection. She could just see the huge silver semi-trailer turning the corner, about to run the red light. Fear traversed her spine and then she was lying in the shattered glass, being pulled away from the sheeted small body on the EMT’s gurney, then she was selecting a coffin…

She was suddenly aware of the council’s anxious voices. “Kenna? Kenna!” Tally Blue was calling, and she put the View-Finder down, trembling. 

“Weren’t you holding her energy here?” Tally Blue asked the council. “How did she nearly slip back into that timeline?”

“Sorry,” said Sidereal Billy. “She’s very strong. I was holding her here with all my strength, but she pulled away.” He waved his hand near Kenna’s ashen face like a magician pulling a coin from her ear, then presented her with a steaming mug. Kenna took a sip—it was dark and refreshing and tasted like nothing she’d ever had before. Iced tea… no, it wasn’t iced tea exactly, and it wasn’t cold or warm, exactly. The liquid rolled around her tongue. There were rich broth-like notes, the sweet peat of a perfect whiskey, echoes of buttery chess pie with notes of crisp autumn pears and the quenching relief of water. Her cheeks began to blossom as she drank.

“It’s my interpretation of what they call ‘coffee,’” Sidereal Billy whispered. “I’ve never tasted it but it’s apparently very important to humans. They have little churches all over the place where you can buy it. I think they call them Starbucks.” 

Tally Blue replaced the View-Master with a different one. “Sorry, my dear,” she said gently. “I meant to stop you before you got to that part. We just wanted you to relive some happy memories for a minute. Here’s the second timeline. It’s mostly the same as the first one, but the part after the accident is different. Whenever you’re ready.”

Kenna took one more gulp then held up the new View-Master with shaking hands. There was the broken glass, the sound of sirens, but as she lay there she felt the whole scene shimmer and melt a little into a different one, where instead of the funeral home and selecting gravestones the next slide was of her in the hospital waiting room; the doctor was approaching. At first he was the doctor she remembered, then she felt a shimmer in the air again, and his face morphed into that of a female doctor, someone with deft hands and a better track record, who was calling her a different name—Katherine? and was telling her that her son would live. They went to see the boy, and as they walked down the hall an orderly shimmered and disappeared completely, the air folding in around the space where he’d just stood. No one noticed. A few feet farther on a brisk young surgeon running for the elevator turned into a wisp of smoke. Far away Kenna could feel Tally Blue’s hand on her shoulder, she could feel the entire council concentrating as they held her from dropping completely into the timeline.The next slide tumbled into place. 

She was in his room now, and he was alive, but everything was broken. His beautiful face was covered in bandages, his eyes were closed. Doctor’s voices mumbled through her fog, speaking about multiple surgeries, a snapped spinal cord, never walk again… But—he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive she sang out in her mind, and she put her hand on top of his pale one—

“Kenna! Kenna!” Tally Blue was shouting now and she felt herself being pulled out of the timeline and back to the faux wooden table. The council’s faces were concerned. “We very nearly lost her that time,” she heard one whisper to another. “Why did those people disappear?” asked another, and Sidereal Billy explained again that the karmic lines were different, so some people were in the wrong place. “They simply get moved to the timelines where they DO belong,” he said, but his voice was concerned. “She wasn’t supposed to be able to touch him, though,” he muttered. “She’s not supposed to be able to touch or change anything.” 

“Would you give us a minute, Kenna?” Tally Blue said, and the council gathered at the end of the table to discuss. 

Kenna watched, a plan half formulating in her mind. She could feel his still little hand under hers at the hospital bed. 

“This is getting out of control,” she heard Tally Blue say. “Clearly we need to re-think this.” She pushed the View-Master box away to make room for a ledger, and without thinking Kenna grabbed the third View-Master and put it to her eyes. She could feel the council’s shock, then the ensuing chaos as she dropped down into the timeline. As she fell she could feel Tally Blue’s energy swoop down next to her, struggling to pull her back but Kenna had the superhuman strength of parental desperation and with Tally Blue still clinging to her by a strand, she fell squarely into the self that was waiting at the car. She saw him in his blue tee shirt, saw him see the sky, saw his seat belt (that useless promise) strapped tightly around his small frame. It was exactly six hundred and seven steps to the intersection, and as they drove past step five hundred and fifty nine with all her might she pushed herself away from Tally Blue’s tentative grasp and broke the connection, then practically stood up on the brake pedal. The car jerked to a halt, the driver behind swerving to barely avoid collision. The silver semi ran the red light and missed her front bumper by inches, the driver’s face shocked and apologetic as he flew past.

Kenna laughed aloud in triumph. Success! She turned to look at her son in the backseat, her beautiful serious little son. He was looking back at her now with such love in his eyes. His school books had spilled all over the back seat. “It’s okay, baby,” she said, putting out her hand but it went right through his knee and the air shimmered and rolled around him. “No,” she said, and she grabbed at him but there was nothing to grab. Her boy was gone.

“What happened?” Tally Blue cried and Sidereal Billy shook his head, frantically flipping through the ledger, following the boy’s timeline. “I thought it would work,” he said, tracing the boy’s soul pattern, “it SHOULD have worked! … Wait, here it is.” He read for a few seconds. “I didn’t factor this in,” he said. “We didn’t look at his karma. He only needed to spend thirteen years as her child, and then he needed to experience a life changing (or life ending) accident. He needed that to happen for reasons only his soul knows. Once Kenna changed her timeline to eliminate the accident he was forced to choose a different parent, one where he could complete his karmic lesson. Here he is! I’ve found him.” Sidereal Billy waved his hand and a portal opened, and through it the council saw a thirteen-year-old Indian boy in a cottage at the foot of the mountains. He was wearing a blue Physical Graffiti tee-shirt and handing his father a cup of tea. A thunderous bank of snow was gathering speed as it began to wind itself into an avalanche, ripping a path down the mountainside towards the hut. The boy saw it as he glanced out the window, assessing the horizon as he liked to do. He liked to look at the sky. He pushed his glasses up his nose, put on his jacket and went outside into the bright and uncompromising light.